Maybe I'll get to your other stuff later, but right now I just want to focus on this.

This is a flat-out lie, and you know it.

Well it certainly seems the media can do no wrong when it comes to how much attention they pay to scandals involving Democrats according to you.

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But you're now outed as a known liar, and I know that you are no more interested in facts than is the standard-issue member of Trump's idiot horde.

I missed the part where you apologized for yet again claiming that I wanted the media to give no coverage whatsoever to Clinton's emails. You have yet to even acknowledge that there's a distinction. The projection is strong with you.

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It's their duty to let Republicans dictate their coverage priorities.

The fact that WaPo reported that Warren lied is not letting "Republicans dictate their coverage priorities." It's reporting something that a candidate for the president of the United States did, that the public has a fucking right to know.

That statement does not refer specifically to that latest WaPo story. The media's coverage of Benghazi and Clinton's emails and the Clinton Foundation is a much clearer case of this.

Indeed, consider the fact that the New York Times and Washington Post had exclusive agreements with the author of Clinton Cash, a book commissioned by Steve Bannon's organization the "Government Accountability Institute", funded by the Mercers. So did Fox News, but who's surprised about that? What's exclusive about it was unclear given that three media orgs had access, but either way, the deal was supposedly to get early looks at parts of the book I guess. But it is ridiculous to suggest that they were letting a Republican hack dictate their reporting by creating such an arrangement.

If Steve Bannon commissions a hit piece on Clinton, it's the media's duty to go out of their way to treat it as a credible investigation.

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*Coincidentally, the media is dominated by large corporations. I'm sure there's no connection between this and how different politicians are treated or how minor scandals can get constant coverage in some cases while larger scandals (like the hurricane response in Puerto Rico, which continues to have negative effects) are old news and given little coverage.

The NYT gave massive coverage of the disaster in Puerto Rico, and scathing coverage, both in news columns and editorial pieces, about Trump's pathetic and evil response to said disaster -- which you would know if you actually read the Times, which you obviously don't. But don't let that inconvenient little fact stop you from lying about what the Times writes, yeah?

And, so sorry, the corporate overseers of the Times offer no input whatsoever into news coverage, and if they tried to do so, there would be an open rebellion among the honorable reporters and editors of the paper.

You'll notice the part about "old news", right? Please try to read more closely. I'm talking about the continuing scandal. Hillary Clinton's emails and Benghazi were somehow multi-year scandals, right? So Puerto Rico, which is objectively a far larger scandal, should be getting a similar level of coverage today, right?

Also, while I did mention the NYT in the bit about Clinton Cash above, I did not mention it in the posts you're replying to, so I don't know why you're saying I'm lying about the Times in particular. The media is a lot of other outlets besides the NYT and WaPo you know.

Either way, I'm rather doubtful you'd be so dismissive of the possibility of negative influence by corporate overlords when it came to anything else. If I argued that XYZ donors have no input whatsoever into [Democratic politician]'s policy decisions, and if they tried to do so, there would be open rebellion among the honorable staffers and interns in their office, you would laugh me out of the room.

But at any rate, I wasn't making the claim specifically about the NYT anyway, although I'm not nearly so sure as you are they are not biased, at least at an unconscious level, by such things.

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Because to do otherwise might mean he was wrong about 2016, or even contributed to the outcome we see now in his capacity as a member of the media.

The only one wrong about 2016 is you. Clinton lost because she was a shit candidate, and not because of the news media. That you and people like you can't deal with this means you are setting yourselves up for another shitty candidate in 2020 and another loss to Trump.

You yourself said that Warren was one of the only two good candidates, and Warren is my top choice right now. But keep telling me how I'm a neoliberal shill because that's the only possible explanation for me thinking you're full of shit.

My concern is that the media will turn her into a shit candidate by obsessing over inane bullshit, aided and abetted by people like you, who would rather let them cripple a candidate like her than admit there were any failures in 2016.

Because I recognize that the media patterns that applied to Clinton are not limited to her because of her supposedly unique shittiness, either personally or on policy, and that progressive candidates are not immune to this type of biased coverage.

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It wasn't the fucking news media that whispered into Hillary's ear to ignore Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, was it?

Pennsylvania and Ohio were her most visited states along with Florida! And she did go to Michigan (although not enough).

Even if this claim were in any way an exoneration of the media (two things can be true at the same time, dumbass), you're simply wrong. The trope is "why didn't she go to Wisconsin?" because Pennsylvania and Ohio aren't states you can say she ignored, but it's not good enough for you to repeat tired cliches, you have to exaggerate them beyond, facts be damned.

Is this the kind of reporting or fact checking you bring to your newspaper job?

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How'd she make out in those Rust Belt states that she took for granted, hm?

She didn't take Pennsylvania and Florida for granted, and without them, Michigan and Wisconsin couldn't have changed the outcome.

In fact, in terms of optimizing her campaign visits based on the chance of the state deciding the election, she should've visited Ohio MUCH LESS, and yes, visited Michigan more, and Wisconsin at all. (Whereas her decision to visit Arizona once, given how close it was, looks fine.)

I've had davidm on ignore for a long time, because he's probably as much of a liar as peacegirl and there certainly aren't enough hours in the day to bother with his Gish gallops when they show up, but I felt compelled to link to this again, lest anyone who missed it in the other thread think "Vichy Times" is some sort of unjustifiable hyperbole, given that he's certainly not going to level with you about the newspaper's real history.

We can expect to hear a lot more about “electability” in the next two years. Voters should understand: It’s alchemy and a crock.

In our current era, it should be buried permanently, as the 2016 victory of Donald Trump – the most “unelectable” politician to ever run for president after David Duke (I’m including “free ponies for all” candidate Vermin Supreme) – exploded what Bloomberg View called “everything we know” about who is and is not electable.

The role of “electability” has always been to convince voters to pick someone other than the candidate they prefer. The idea is to tell audiences which candidate has the broad appeal to win.

The metric pundits usually employ is, “Which Democrat could most easily pass for a Republican?” and vice-versa.

“Electability” tends to come up most in election seasons when the incumbent president is violently unpopular with minority-party voters. This is why people should be cautious now. With Democratic voters so anguished by Trump’s presidency they’ll pick anyone they think is the best bet to win, be on the lookout for experts pretending to know the unknowable — how the broad mean of voters will behave nearly two years from now.

“Electability” is how Democratic voters were convinced to pick John Kerry in 2004. Media outlets reminded us over and over that an anti-war candidate like Howard Dean could never win, and that a tall, “nuanced,” fiscally conservative veteran like Kerry “better fit the cold calculus of electability.”

Kerry was the living embodiment of “electability.” His position on the Iraq War was ambiguous and he spent much of the campaign pushing a “tough” image. Upon securing the nomination, the Kerry campaign released a video showing him with an arm around John McCain, and touting his defiance of the Democratic Party to vote for a balanced budget.

The 2004 race, we later learned in The New York Times, was about “electability itself,” with voters acting like players in a futures market, guessing how other market actors would behave down the line.

The result was a campaign in which Kerry didn’t win a single Southern or Southwestern state.

The same thing happened to Republican voters in 2012, when a near-consensus of pundits told red-staters Mitt Romney was the most “electable” choice in the field to take on the hated Barack Obama. We know how that turned out.

Journalist Matt Taibbi goes on to quote all the pundits opining on the un-"electability" of the candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
I also learned from this article that the first Dem debates take place in June 2019.

(Not that I'm expecting a reply from chunks, he claims to have me on ignore because I'm a "center-right* status-quo fool". Maybe someday he'll be able to admit he was completely wrong about the ACA being the Heritage Foundation plan... maybe somebody else could ask him about it.

*lol)

I agree with the basic premise of the article - predicting who's electable beforehand is not easy, and the idea that moderation/centrism is automatically electable is significantly flawed. Whether that makes sense depends a lot on which issues you're talking about and what the opposing candidate is doing, etc. it's pretty clear that saying the wealthy don't pay their fair share and they need to pay more is popular with the majority of Americans, so it doesn't make sense to say that the "center" position is in opposition to that.

But sure, there may be other issues where moderation is better for electability. But the media is going to push Bloomberg and Schultz as centrists even though their economic policy views are significantly to the right of the median American.

But I do take issue with a couple of the claims:

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Originally Posted by Taibbi

In our current era, it should be buried permanently, as the 2016 victory of Donald Trump – the most “unelectable” politician to ever run for president after David Duke (I’m including “free ponies for all” candidate Vermin Supreme) – exploded what Bloomberg View called “everything we know” about who is and is not electable.

I don't think it explodes everything we know. We know that Trump was able to get away with a lot, and this was connected to Clinton's low favorables. Hers were actually not as bad as Trump's, but other factors (like the economy just being ok and it being a third term for the Democrats, and specifics of his campaign pitch being racist but promising not to cut entitlements, and oh FBI ratfucking and Russian hackers) made up for it in specific states (he did get fewer votes after all). The fundamentals would've predicted generic Republican to win the popular vote, so Trump did underperform those, even despite Clinton's weaknesses and dirty tricks used against her.

But when it came to an election where he wasn't up against an unpopular opponent, there was no FBI ratfucking and there was no high-profile hacking of private emails... Trump's low approval rating dragged down his party, being strongly correlated with results in individual districts, and they had the worst results in the House popular vote for a majority party ever (it was not the worst result in seats, largely due to gerrymandering).

Trump doesn't totally rewrite the rules or defy political gravity. His unpopularity does matter.

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“Electability” is how Democratic voters were convinced to pick John Kerry in 2004.

That might be why Kerry was chosen, and he might not have been the best candidate in 2004, but he did slightly outperform the fundamentals. It's easy to think Bush should've been easy to beat, especially in retrospect after the full clusterfuck of the Iraq War became more obvious, but his approval rating was ok and the economy was doing pretty well, so he was favored to win. I hated Bush and never supported the war, but most Americans did not agree until at a minimum after the Democratic primaries (and the public was still pretty evenly divided on it through the end of 2004). Even now, public opinion polls are not overwhelmingly against the Iraq War.

It seems to be taken as a given that Kerry was a horrible candidate, but more quantitative approaches suggest he did fine. I can see thinking he should've done better because those approaches don't account for everything, but I think they do limit how bad you can say he was.

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The result was a campaign in which Kerry didn’t win a single Southern or Southwestern state.

This says almost nothing except "Kerry didn't win" and "political trends in the South continued". I don't know why it's stated as if it's telling us something that you wouldn't guess from knowing that Bush won the popular vote.

If Kerry had instead won the popular vote by about 2.1 pts, like Clinton, he would've won Iowa, New Mexico, Ohio, Nevada and thus the election. It's also possible he could've won Colorado and Florida in that scenario.

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The same thing happened to Republican voters in 2012, when a near-consensus of pundits told red-staters Mitt Romney was the most “electable” choice in the field to take on the hated Barack Obama. We know how that turned out.

To be fair, it's not clear who would've done better than Romney. Gingrich, Santorum, Bachmann, Cain? Huntsman? Maybe a more Trump-like candidate could've won, but their main problem was that Obama was just in a good position for reelection based on the economy, his approval rating, strength in some Midwestern states due to saving the auto industry, etc.

So what I would say is that I would arrive at a similar conclusion but almost for opposite reasons. Trump is consistently unpopular, and 2018 showed that he doesn't have some magic immunity to the effects of that. Which means that most Democrats should be able to beat him as long as we don't pick a trainwreck (Gabbard is someone who might be a trainwreck, for example). Picking Biden because he seems more electable is probably overestimating how much a candidate matters. If you don't like Biden, you have plenty of options. I'd also refer again to this piece again about how class resentment appears to be a winning message even though the media wouldn't call it "moderate" or "centrist".

But I wouldn't say "Trump proves the 'rules' don't matter, so Democrats can pick anyone, anyone, and don't need to worry!"

That said, maximizing our margin is more important than people think. If, theoretically, Biden can win by 10 pts but Sanders can only win by 4 pts, this probably means that Biden will be able to pass more progressive legislation than Sanders by virtue of bringing more Senate Democrats in on his coattails.

(This is why it was particularly irritating when people with Sanders campaign in 2016 said they were willing to damage Clinton in the general in order to extract policy concessions even though they couldn't win the nomination. Ignoring the fact that Trump obviously wasn't guaranteed to lose, winning more senate seats would gain you more on policy than getting more concessions on the platform and every point of margin over Trump could've brought more senators along. Regardless of how much damage you think he actually did, the point is that the reasoning is wrong.)

I don't know. Last election was just 70,000 short for Clinton in PA, Michigan and Ohio? Things are different this election. Hopefully there isn't anything the FBI can pop out at the last minute to announce about Warren. I think the sides are going to be delineated more clearly this time, which might tend to give Warren a chance. How much can we bank on Trump voters won't vote for him again after living the reality of the Trump presidency? I just feel like running Warren seems iffy.

Kind of split. On the one hand, I can make a case for a walk in the park. On the other, I never ever thought Trump could win last time.

__________________Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant

I'm going to guess that the RC hobbyists on that board tend to be middle-aged white dudes. Just a hunch.

Not exactly the Democratic Party base.

The polls suggest her proposed policies are popular and that she doesn't do worse against Trump than other potential nominees, aside from Sanders and Biden (who benefit from very high name recognition). It's also notable that in most of these polls, Trump's percentage of the vote doesn't vary much (varying 1 to 3% between matchups depending on the pollster) - the difference between the Democrats is mostly in how many people say they're undecided vs. would vote for the Democrat. Which does suggest that name recognition is a large source of the variation (people don't like to say they'll vote for a politician they know little about, even when their eventual choice is predictable... if you would vote for both Biden and Sanders, the chances you wouldn't vote for Warren are pretty low, for example).

(As for criticizing Democratic primary candidates, I hope that's not meant to refer to me or anything. I was pretty sure I made a post discussing my thoughts on the various candidates and I mentioned things that concerned me about some of the candidates. Which I think would fall under "criticism". But maybe it's because I'm not declaring Booker an enemy of the people or something and I think Bernie's not so perfect? I mean, who could take issue with declaring Booker "completely in the pocket of Wall Street" or that Biden has literally done nothing good in his career other than someone who thinks that you can never criticize Democrats? )

Yeah, they are surely mostly older whites. The kind that beat us last election when we ran a candidate with real baggage who wasn't especially exciting for minorities. The post is back up if anyone wants to see what Elizabeth is in for.

__________________Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant

It's such utter fucking bullshit. Our family was convinced that my maternal great-great grandmother was Native American, based on what my grandmother always said. It was only very recently that we found out that, while she probably believed that 100%, she was most likely wrong - we don't seem to have the DNA we should, plus there is no other evidence to corroborate it. I think my grandmother based the whole thing on her memory of what her grandma looked like.

TL;DR - Warren was probably working under the same sort of family "certainty" that I was. I bet a dollar to a donut that she was never dishonest about it whatsoever. But Agent Orange managed to twist the narrative just right, and now she has "baggage."

Hurry up, please, Mr. Mueller. Fucker needs to be forced to resign BEFORE the election, not after.

Sorry, Sock. But the window for resignation before the election closed three years ago. It doesn't matter what anyone has to say about what he's done while in office. We have to stay the course and not jump horses over the shark(s) in the middle of the stream of spilled milk flowing under the bridge. We have to wait until after the midterms, and preferably after 2020 before the Truth™ can be even looked at by a completely fair and unbiased Republican led committee.

It's such utter fucking bullshit. Our family was convinced that my maternal great-great grandmother was Native American, based on what my grandmother always said. It was only very recently that we found out that, while she probably believed that 100%, she was most likely wrong - we don't seem to have the DNA we should, plus there is no other evidence to corroborate it. I think my grandmother based the whole thing on her memory of what her grandma looked like.

TL;DR - Warren was probably working under the same sort of family "certainty" that I was. I bet a dollar to a donut that she was never dishonest about it whatsoever. But Agent Orange managed to twist the narrative just right, and now she has "baggage."

Hurry up, please, Mr. Mueller. Fucker needs to be forced to resign BEFORE the election, not after.

That can very much be the case, but I perceive a great risk in counting on anyone to be fair. It's pretty clear cut. She had a DNA test, she isn't NA. She wrote Native American on that card. She didn't just appropriate minority culture, she appropriated minority identity. I don't think that's going to go over very well.

__________________Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant

I think the whole native American DNA fiasco shows very poor judgement on the part of Elizabeth Warren. I don't think she would be able to handle the shit that will flow from Trump's campaign in the general election.

1. it's too early to be disqualifying someone on the prospect that the media won't let go of something you yourself consider a minor issue

2. Democrats and allies ought to be pushing back against inanities like this dominating coverage because

3. even if it's not Warren, there's a good chance some other bullshit will be used against the candidate, and it's better to be pushing back on media biases (whether you consider them right-wing bias, or bias towards inanity, or bias towards clicks/ratings, both-sides-ism, whatever) that damage Democrats now, instead of waiting until June when we discover that nominee Bernie Sanders's general election campaign coverage is going to be dominated by Jane Sanders's university mismanagement*, that time he attended a Sandinista rally where they chanted about how "the Yankee will die", and his weird rape fantasy essay instead of his policy platform, his substantive political record, and how that compares to Trump, etc.

*and remember how there was an FBI investigation and the media was all obligated to run front page stories about it repeatedly? Because it was automatically big news because it was an FBI investigation and it should be treated as prima facie valid and likely to uncover crimes?

It's such utter fucking bullshit. Our family was convinced that my maternal great-great grandmother was Native American, based on what my grandmother always said. It was only very recently that we found out that, while she probably believed that 100%, she was most likely wrong - we don't seem to have the DNA we should, plus there is no other evidence to corroborate it. I think my grandmother based the whole thing on her memory of what her grandma looked like.

TL;DR - Warren was probably working under the same sort of family "certainty" that I was. I bet a dollar to a donut that she was never dishonest about it whatsoever. But Agent Orange managed to twist the narrative just right, and now she has "baggage."

Hurry up, please, Mr. Mueller. Fucker needs to be forced to resign BEFORE the election, not after.

That can very much be the case, but I perceive a great risk in counting on anyone to be fair. It's pretty clear cut. She had a DNA test, she isn't NA. She wrote Native American on that card. She didn't just appropriate minority culture, she appropriated minority identity. I don't think that's going to go over very well.

That was not my understanding at all.

She had claimed that her family had accepted that there was a native American ancestor. She recently had a DNA test done which confirmed that there WAS an American native ancestor, but it was further back in the family tree than she thought and it did not qualify her for any benefits under the law whatsoever.

The evidence fit her claim, though. It was a valid but dilute claim. Dump welched on his wager....big surprise.

And, yes....My family went through this same pile of bullshit. Prior to my grandparents generation, my family hailed from the Dakotas. They spent two or three generations in the proximity of the Lakota reservation. In my youth, I had one of my six aunts launch a claim that there was a Lakota ancestor. She even enlisted my grandmother's complicity in putting forward the claim. It took another aunt twenty years of sleuthing and multiple contacts with the reservation authorities to put the false claim to rest, before DNA testing was a thing. Subsequent DNA testing shows NO NA genetic influence whatsoever....it's all Anglo-Celtic ancestry. Whitebread white bread. Well, shiploads of freckles.

That may all very well be the case, but it's largely irrelevant. The problem is going to be be getting republicans, minorities, and the credulous who like the other side of the story to see it that way. If you can't see why minorities aren't going to be enthusiastic about voting for someone who falsely claimed minority status, I don't think you truly understand the dimensions of the issue. It is a problem. I think you're projecting your own excuse onto her, and by extension, excusing the mistake.

The problem isn't so much whites who think she got into college by claiming minority status. They won't vote for her or whoever our candidate is anyway. The problem is in turning off the minority vote.

__________________Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant

As of now, Elizabeth Warren has clearly expressed the most openness to eliminating the filibuster. Some big things can be done through reconciliation (you can lower the eligibility age for Medicare to whatever you want, even zero, for example) if they are considered to be basically spending or tax changes. But quite a few important things cannot be done that way: voting rights, anti-gerrymandering, DC/PR statehood, immigration reform, gun control, environmental regulations, criminal justice reforms, etc.

And notably, without pro-democracy changes like those first three, Democrats would likely lose their ability to pass anything or appoint judges after 2022.

But maybe Bernie Sanders is just pretending to be bothered by the idea of killing the filibuster. I hope so.

Sanders stunned the Democratic establishment in 2016 with his spirited challenge to Hillary Clinton. His campaign helped lay the groundwork for the leftward lurch that has dominated Democratic politics in the era of President Donald Trump.

The question now for Sanders is whether he can stand out in a crowded field of Democrats who embrace many of his policy ideas and who are newer to the national political stage.

Not a Democrat, you say? Sure. Old, you say? Sure. Show me another person who has been consistent in their message and who has done more to push this sick fucking narrative to the left in the US than any other person in your lifetime. Watch every Democratic candidate adopt substantial portions of Bernie's platform.
Game on

I don't favor eliminating the filibuster. The minute we do it it'll blow up in our face, just like when we eliminated it for appointments. Not until the demographics play out and the GOP is a fading shadow of its former self. For now, they're still formidable in the capacity for insidious scheming, subterfuge and misdirection of the public. It's still really hard to outconnive the republicans. The minute we do it it'll blow up in our face, just like when we eliminated it for appointments.

__________________Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant

It didn't blow up in our face when we eliminated it for appointments. There were a bunch of vacant executive branch positions and vacant seats on district courts that Republicans were not allowing Obama to fill. Eliminating the non-SCOTUS appointment filibuster allowed him to fill them. The Republicans were radically expanding the use of the filibuster to simply hold seats vacant to prevent Democrats from gaining/expanding majorities on courts, and to hobble the executive branch.

Three years later, the Republicans radically expanded obstructionism further by blocking Obama from appointing a Supreme Court justice altogether. The filibuster was not relevant since they had a majority, but it does show the radicalism they bring.

Four years later, the Republicans eliminated it to get Gorsuch through, and quickly. You're delusional if you think McConnell would've let the filibuster stop them from regaining a majority on the Supreme Court. It might be true that the filibuster for executive branch officials might not have been eliminated immediately and McConnell would've let it stand to pressure Trump to pick better nominees in some cases (like Perry at Energy, or Carson at HUD), but that would've been at the cost of worse government from 2013-2016. And Democrats probably would have filibustered Sessions for AG, and I don't think McConnell would've been willing to let that stand.

Keeping the filibuster under Obama would've just meant that the executive branch was understaffed, and there would be even more judicial vacancies for Trump to fill. It would not have led to McConnell allowing Democrats to block right-wing nutjob, racist, misogynist and/or theocrat appointees indefinitely.

The filibuster for appointments died because the Republican Party decided that Democratic administrations don't have any legitimacy and Democratic Congressional input doesn't either. Being nice to the Republicans and letting them filibuster some stuff won't make them keep it around when it suits them to eliminate it*. It will just mean they will block anything Democrats want to do even if they have a clear majority, and by hobbling government and voting rights, they will simultaneously make it harder for Democrats to be reelected.

I think Democrats could improve voting rights and democracy in the US and people's lives, and those things would make them more likely to be reelected. But they'll only be able to do most of that if the filibuster dies.

The experience with Garland's and Gorsuch's nominations also shows that these procedural changes aren't likely to have much political blowback. Republicans still won after blocking Garland, and the Democrats' wins in 2018 were not because of eliminating the filibuster for Gorsuch (indeed, the GOP expanded their senate majority), but because of the attempts to gut Medicaid and the ACA, the tax cuts being giveaways to the rich, and Trump's general criminality and incompetence.

*To be honest, they'll only likely eliminate it if they are planning on transitioning to a one-party-dominated faux democracy, because the filibuster is far more useful for the GOP than the Democratic Party. Stopping new government programs with the filibuster is much harder than letting them shrivel through budget shenanigans. Their priorities are more easily achieved with it. Keep in mind also how long civil rights bills were blocked by filibusters. And since the senate is biased towards Republicans due to small Western states and California/New York/Illinois getting only six senators, it will be easier for them to achieve a majority large enough to make the filibuster irrelevant, whereas the filibuster will almost always be able to block Democratic initiatives. They didn't get rid of it this time because the ability to block future Democratic legislation is far more important than having a slightly easier time passing tax cuts and gutting healthcare. They couldn't get 50 votes for repealing the ACA in the first place, so the filibuster wasn't relevant there. That it's even a debate whether repealing the filibuster to address the existential threat of climate change, expand voting rights, make DC a state, pass gun control, reform immigration, etc. shows that it wouldn't have been worth it for McConnell. The possibility that president Harris or Warren or Sanders won't be able to pass almost anything was too valuable to give up for a bill that struggled to get even 50 votes. It shouldn't be a debate for Democrats - climate change alone would justify eliminating it.